Lark bracelet helps improve quality of your sleep

MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, April 22, 2012

Photo: Jill Schneider, The Chronicle

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Julia Hu, CEO of Lark. Lark, introduced last year is the "silent alarm clock" that wakes you up gently and without disturbing the person sleeping with you. It also monitors your sleeping patterns to help you sleep better. The offices are located in Mountain View, California, on Thursday, April 19th, 2012. less

Julia Hu, CEO of Lark. Lark, introduced last year is the "silent alarm clock" that wakes you up gently and without disturbing the person sleeping with you. It also monitors your sleeping patterns to help you ... more

Photo: Jill Schneider, The Chronicle

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Lark, introduced last year is the "silent alarm clock" that wakes you up gently and without disturbing the person sleeping with you. It also monitors your sleeping patters to help you sleep better. Can be found at any Apple store and compatible with any IPhone, Ipad or Ipod touch. less

Lark, introduced last year is the "silent alarm clock" that wakes you up gently and without disturbing the person sleeping with you. It also monitors your sleeping patters to help you sleep better. Can be found ... more

Photo: Jill Schneider, The Chronicle

Lark bracelet helps improve quality of your sleep

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Julia Hu just wanted to get a good night's sleep when she dreamed up the idea for Lark.

Dubbed the "silent alarm clock," "sleep monitor" and "personal sleep coach," Lark is a bracelet that sleepers wear on their wrist as they snooze. Sensors track their sleep throughout the night, sending the data wirelessly to the Web and their iPhone or iPad app. In the morning, the bracelet gently vibrates to wake them up. It also offers an assessment and suggestions to get a better night's rest.

Lark - part of an emerging field of health and mobile technology - was released with much buzz last summer at Apple Stores in the United States. Since then, the Mountain View startup has expanded to sell its silent alarm clock at Apple Stores around the globe, as well as other national retailers such as Best Buy. A partner with the National Sleep Foundation, it has also begun working with doctors, therapists and other health care professionals who use the device with their patients.

The 27-year-old Stanford graduate has also been propelled to the forefront of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs, including being named a "top inventor" by Marie Claire magazine.

Q:How did you get the idea for Lark?

A: It's very personal to me. I had just moved in with my (now) fiance and we both started to go to grad school (MIT Sloan School of Management) together. Grad school was already so challenging. On top of that, my fiance would wake me up at 5:30 every single morning with his alarm clock. And I could never fall asleep again. I was already sleeping so little. I totally felt it. I was more irritable, I felt a lot slower, I started gaining weight and was just much less creative. I realized that sleep was so important.

Q:How does the personal sleep coach work?

A: We have sleep experts of each area of expertise contribute to our personal sleep coach. One of the experts is an expert in circadian rhythm. They know your body clock and when you're getting the best sleep at night. For certain people, your sleep is deepest at certain times. By allowing you to see that, we start helping you shift your body clock forward or backward. We work on optimizing your body clock.

The other thing we do is we look at what impacts your sleep the most. We have this feature called tags. Every morning, you click a couple of buttons about what you did yesterday. We run correlations on what impacts your sleep the most: Is it stress? Is it exercise at a certain time during the day? Is it light? Based on those things, we can then train you and send push notifications to help you improve your sleep (such as a bedtime reminder). Those tiny little things are the things that motivate and change behaviors. Our goal is to show people that sleep can be your secret weapon.

Q:What's next for Lark?

A: We've just scratched the surface on how you interpret people's sleep data and turn it around and coach them toward better sleep.

Our goal is to support our international market, to grow the market of aiding doctors, therapists and coaches to improve their clients' sleep, and to work toward getting a much more interactive, rich experience. We think sleep can really improve what matters most to people in their lives.

Q:How well do you sleep?

A: Literally it has changed my life. I used to sleep probably 5.5 hours a night. The sleep was really bad because I would sleep whenever I had the chance. Since developing this, I use Lark every night. I am asleep for around 7.5 hours. My sleep efficiency is up; I actually have many more minutes of sleep even though I don't have that much more time in bed. I've gotten better at my sleep, and increased it. So it's great. I am so much happier and so much more productive.

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